Ahrefs vs Website Crawler

Ahrefs is a web and API platform for SEO research, including keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlink analysis and competitor research. It also provides content tools, AI assistants and MCP access. Content Explorer can find web mentions and link prospects, while AI Content Helper supports content improvement. The free plan provides site data and fixes with limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit. Paid plans start with Starter at $29 a month. Lite costs $129 a month and includes five projects, 750 tracked keywords, 100,000 monthly crawl credits and one user; its Site Audit allowance has a 25,000-page project maximum. Annual payment saves up to 17%. Enterprise costs $1,499 a month and requires an annual commitment; it includes SSO, two-factor authentication, ISO27001 certification, access management, audit logs and unlimited additional users. Ahrefs says its web index contains 170 trillion pages, tracks 41.9 billion keywords and filters 28.7 billion keywords; AhrefsBot crawls 8 billion pages daily. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Singapore. Multilingual support is available five days a week.

Website Crawler is a cloud-based website analyzer, scraper and data extractor that crawls pages and reports on-page SEO issues. It can flag broken links, canonical links, duplicate titles and meta tags, missing image alt text, thin content and heading-structure problems. Chrome and HTML crawl modes are available for JavaScript-heavy sites, while HTML mode processes raw HTML only. Users can configure CSS or XPath selectors and JavaScript snippets for custom extraction. Crawl results export to CSV, Markdown or JSON, and the API retrieves structured JSON. The service also offers uptime monitoring and alerts for downtime and SSL certificate expiry; paid-plan intervals range from five minutes to one minute. Integrations include read-only Google Search Console access and Slack notifications. The Basic free plan is free and allows 10 pages per day and one project. Starter is $10 a month for 2,000 pages per month and three projects; Growth is $20 a month for 10,000 pages and ten projects; Scale is $60 a month for 50,000 pages and 50 projects. It works with publicly available HTML-page information and does not submit forms.